“THE imperialist project has failed,” Cuban ambassador Ismara Vargas Walter told the Communist Party congress today. “For 65 years now they have tried to extinguish the light of Cuban socialism.

“They have tried to starve us into submission. They have tried to slander us into isolation — but we are still here,” she said to thunderous applause.

Ms Vargas Walter warned that the crippling US blockade was “a siege, not an embargo” designed “to inflict suffering and deprivation on the Cuban people and provoke hunger, desperation and the overthrow of the government.” But it had again been rejected overwhelmingly at the United Nations.

She thanked the Communist Party, the 20 British trade unions affiliated to the Cuba Solidarity Campaign and the Morning Star for building solidarity with Cuba across the country.

And she affirmed Cuba’s ongoing solidarity with peoples resisting imperialism, including Venezuela, currently threatened by US attack, Nicaragua — and “first and foremost the heroic and suffering people of Palestine.”